So apparently a long term account was hacked or something and has been posting huge lorem ipsum comments on many videos. The account appears to be banned now, but how can we clear out the posts? They are lagging out the comments section from loading.

Like everyone who's been a Sifter for a while (or even 11 years, like some of us!), one of the things we appreciate most is that the community takes care of the community, including welcoming new members and more often telling likely spammers and abusers to take a hike.

The two most frequent practices used in dealing with potential baddies is the *ban invocation and the *spammer invocation. These are very powerful invocations and must be used with great responsibility. Until now, their use has gone mostly unchecked, taking every invocation in good faith.

Posting a video to the SIFT has been impossible for me over the past 22 hours or so. First weird thing was I was logged off when I clicked on the site [I'm NEVER logged out]. Then, after attempting to submit a YT video as I usually do, I got the following error message:

I deleted my cookies and browsing history after logging out of the site. I restarted my computer and logged in again ... Now it appears that I can't post anything at all. I've tried to put up 2 other YT vids and, after verifying the embed code and filling in the form, I get the same error message when I hit submit. It doesn't appear that I'm restricted in any other way here. I haven't had any recent google updates and the site was working fine for me several hours before all of this started happening.

Either way, you should know that your privacy is being sold out. So either make some noise to convince the American President to veto the law, or start shopping for a VPN, for as long as that remains helpful.

I just discovered by accident that when you hover your mouse over YouTube embeds they're apparently now stepping through thumbnails from the video so you can preview pieces of the thing before you ever actually click it!

That's a wonderful development. Has anyone else seen this or heard an announcement about this? Is this common knowledge?